Announcements 2010

14 January 2010: On 12 January 2010, ESO Director General Tim de Zeeuw met the Chilean president Michelle Bachelet at the Palacio La Moneda in Santiago. Chilean Vice-minister of Foreign Affairs, Ángel Flisfisch, Ambassador Gabriel Rodriguez from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the ESO Representative in Chile, Massimo Tarenghi also attended. Since 1966, ESO has built in Chile a series of world-class observing facilities, establishing a fruitful and long-term collaboration with Chilean society. Currently, ESO operates three sites in the Atacama Desert region of Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor.

4 January 2010: The year 2009 was celebrated as the International Year of Astronomy and has proved to be exceptional both for astronomy and for ESO. At Paranal, ESO’s flagship observatory, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) started work at the end of 2009. Its first stunning images have been released and promise plenty of superb achievements for the year to come (ESO eso0949). Also at Paranal, ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the world’s most advanced ground-based observatory, was further enhanced. The VLT welcomed the first of its second generation instruments, X-shooter, which is able to record the entire visible-light spectrum of a celestial object in a single shot (ESO eso0920). One of X-shooter’s targets will be gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions taking place in the Universe. The VLT has allowed astronomers to determine the distance of a gamma-ray burst that emitted light only about 600 million years after ...